Literati Presents | Amanda Uhle: Destroy This House

When

Tuesday August 26, 2025: 6:30pm to 7:30pm  Add to Calendar /   Add to Google Calendar

Where

Downtown Library: 1st Floor Lobby

Description

Join Amanda Uhle to celebrate the release of her memoir, Destroy This House. She'll be joined in conversation by Davy Rothbart. 

About The Book: For fans of The Glass Castle and The Liars’ Club, a tender, heartbreaking, and hilarious memoir chronicling the challenges of growing up with a desperately scheming father, a mother plagued by an acute hoarding disorder, and parenting parents while seeking independence.

The Long family’s love was fierce, their lifestyle bizarre, and their deceptions countless. Once her parents were gone, Amanda Uhle realized she was closer to them than anyone else, yet she found herself utterly confounded by the lives they had led.

Amanda’s striving fashion designer mother and her charismatic wheeler-dealer father wove a complex life together that spanned ten different homes across five states over forty perplexing years. Throughout her childhood, as her mother’s hoarding disorder flourished and her father’s schemes crumbled, contradictions abounded. They bartered for dental surgery and drove their massive Lincoln Town Car to the food bank. When financial ruin struck, they abandoned their repossessed mansion for humble parish housing, and Amanda’s father became a preacher. They swung between being filthy rich and dirt poor, devious and virtuous, lonely and loved, fake and real.

In Destroy This House, Amanda sets out to document her parents’ unbelievable exploits and her own hard-won escape into independence. With humor and tenderness, Uhle has crafted a heartfelt and utterly unique memoir, capturing the raucousness, pain, joy, and ultimately, the boundless love that exists between all parents and children.

Amanda Uhle writes about culture, politics, and civil rights for The Washington Post, Politico Magazine, The Boston Globe, and Newsweek. Uhle is coeditor of the I, Witness series of first-person stories by youth activists, former director of the 826michigan youth writing and tutoring program, and cofounder, with Dave Eggers, of the International Congress of Youth Voices. Their work with youth writing organizations worldwide is documented in Unnecessarily Beautiful Spaces for Young Minds on Fire. Uhle is the publisher and executive director of McSweeney’s, an independent nonprofit publisher of distinctive books and magazines.

Davy Rothbart is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, journalist, bestselling author, creator of Found Magazine and a frequent contributor to public radio’s “This American Life.” His documentary film, “17 Blocks,” spans two decades and illuminates a nation’s ongoing crisis of addiction and gun violence through one family’s raw, stirring and deeply personal saga. His previous documentary, “Medora,” follows the down-but-not-out varsity basketball team in a rural Indiana community fighting for its survival. Rothbart’s work has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The California Sunday Magazine, GQ and Grantland, while his stories on “This American Life” have amassed more than 30 million listeners. Rothbart is the author of the bestselling essay collection “My Heart Is an Idiot,” and he contributed writing to the Oscar-winning short “The Neighbor’s Window.” He is also the founder of Washington To Washington, an annual hiking adventure for kids from underserved communities.

This event is in partnership with Literati Bookstore and includes a signing with books for sale.

The Library intends to provide a live stream of this event pending the presenter's permission. Please check back closer to the event for additional updates.